Bleaching Ground in the Countryside Near Haarlem

» Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/9–82)

Seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artists did not paint en plein air (“in the open air”).

When Jacob van Ruisdael set out to produce an image such as the Bleaching Ground, he might have gone to the location, chosen a vantage point, and sketched the scene. The final work, however, would have been created in his studio. There he combined his observations with artistic convention. In the Bleaching Ground and similar works, the result was an image that appeared to be directly and meticulously copied from nature. Scholars often refer to this kind of representation of perceived reality as a “reality effect.”

A blue sky filled with puffy cumulus clouds dominates Ruisdael’s Bleaching Ground in the Countryside Near Haarlem. Depicted from a raised vantage point, the landscape, occupying the lower third of the canvas, is flat and expansive. In contrast to the large, amorphous clouds above, the land is marked by carefully plotted fields, tidy houses, and detailed greenery. Sky and earth are separated by a nearly straight horizon line, broken only by the towering architecture of St. Bavo’s left of center and the silhouette of another smaller church in the distance. Sunlight touches the clouds as it streams down, illuminating the bleaching field in the landscape’s middle ground.

Like similar paintings of the period, Ruisdael’s Bleaching Ground is not an image of nature unmediated, but of natural resources harnessed for the benefit of civilization. It is an image that speaks to the harmonious, but hard-won relationship between the Dutch and their land. From the 1560s until 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia was concluded, the Dutch fought against the Spanish for self-sovereignty. Their fight for land was a matter of politics as well as one of geographic adversity. At or below sea level, the Dutch landscape in the seventeenth century was in large part comprised of polders, areas reclaimed from under water through the use of dikes, windmills, pumps, and containing walls. This reclaimed land, in turn, became a source of economic prosperity for the nascent Dutch Republic.

The critical role of land, cultivated through labor, is evident in Ruisdael’s painting, as is a sense of local identification with the landscape. A line of trees running diagonally from the right foreground of the work divides a swampy half-submerged area from the dry ground, where strips of linen are laid out for bleaching. Next to brewing, bleaching was the most important industry in Haarlem, and the renown of “Haarlem bleaching” was such that visitors from foreign locales as well as from the city proper visited the countryside to see the process in action. Outsiders might have purchased images like this one as souvenirs. More likely, though, the owners of such paintings were Dutch for whom the landscape was a point of pride. The presence of St. Bavo’s on the horizon identifies the city beyond as Haarlem, at the same time suggesting the role of divine providence in the success of the Dutch.